Every so often, someone has designed a new, faster grep-type program.
Public domain software archives have more than a few of them.
One of the fastest search programs has been around for years: look.
It uses a binary search method that's very fast.
But look won't solve all your problems: it works only on files that
have been
sorted (36.1).
If you have a big file or database that can be sorted,
searching it with look will save a lot of time.
For example, to search for all lines that start with Alpha: